No. 2152

Reed Birds, Roasted

Mesanges Moustaches Roties

Remove the gizzards and the pouch from the birds; cut off the legs halfway, singe and cover with bards of fat pork pared very thin; thrust small skewers through, and spread the birds with a spare layer of softened butter; roast them for seven to eight minutes at a brisk fire, salt over when unwrapping and dress on buttered and browned crusts. Serve with sliced lemon.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

The instructions are clear enough, but the bird at the center of them cannot legally be bought, shot, or cooked in the United States. What follows explains the terms and then why the dish is closed to us.

What a reed bird isThe "reed bird" of nineteenth-century American markets is the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), netted and shot by the thousand in tidal reeds and southern rice fields during migration, when the birds were fat.
Why this cannot be madeThe bobolink is a migratory songbird protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Killing, possessing, selling, or serving one is a federal offense, and no licensed source exists. The market hunting that supplied Delmonico's kitchen was among the practices the Act was written to end.
No substitution is being offered hereSmall game birds are still sold legally, but a farmed quail is a different bird in size, fat, and cooking time, and the seven-to-eight-minute roast in the original is calibrated to a bird a few ounces in weight. If you want to cook quail or squab, use a current recipe written for them.
Bards of fat porkA bard is a thin sheet of pork fatback tied or skewered over lean flesh to baste it as it cooks. It survives in modern charcuterie and in classic roasting of very lean birds; caul fat and thinly sliced fatback are the usual stand-ins today.
"The pouch"Small birds of this kind were traditionally cooked whole and undrawn apart from the gizzard and crop, the "pouch" here being the crop at the base of the throat. The trail was eaten with the bird, as it still is with woodcock in Europe.
Buttered and browned crustsThe croûton beneath the bird is structural, not decorative: it catches the fat and juices, which were the point of eating a bird this small. Ranhofer uses the same device elsewhere in the game chapter.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its game chapter is a straightforward inventory of what the city's markets sold. Reed birds were among the cheapest items on it: bobolinks fattened on wild rice and cultivated grain were taken in enormous numbers along the Delaware and the Carolina coasts each autumn and shipped north by the barrel, appearing on restaurant menus by the dozen and in home cookbooks skewered, broiled, or baked in pies. The trade collapsed under the same wave of legislation that ended the market for plover and curlew, culminating in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, though the bobolink has since undergone substantial long-term decline with the loss of grassland and hayfield habitat. Recipes like this one are the clearest surviving evidence of how differently a nineteenth-century kitchen understood the line between songbird and food.